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EDMUND
, Nature, art my goddess; to law My services are bound. should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me? For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With base? With baseness? bastardy? Base, base? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than within a dull stale tired bed Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween asleep and wake? Well then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land: Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine word: legitimate! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
GLOUCESTER
Kent banish’d thus! and France in choler parted! And the King gone tonight! Prescrib’d his pow’r! Confin’d to exhibition! All this done Upon the gad!—Edmund, how now! What news?
EDMUND
So please your lordship, none.
GLOUCESTER
Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
EDMUND
I know no news, my lord.
GLOUCESTER
What paper were you reading?
EDMUND
Nothing, my lord.
GLOUCESTER
No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing not such need to hide itself. Let’s see. Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
EDMUND
I beseech you, sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother that I have not all o’er-read; and for so much as I have perus’d, I find it not fit for your o’er-looking.
GLOUCESTER
Give me the letter, sir.
EDMUND
I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame.
GLOUCESTER
Let’s see, let’s see!
EDMUND
I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay, or taste of my virtue.
GLOUCESTER
‘This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways not as it power, but as it is suffered. Come to me, that of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live the beloved of your brother EDGAR.’ Hum! Conspiracy? ‘Sleep till I wake him, you should enjoy half his revenue.’—My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it in? When came this to you? Who brought it?
EDMUND
It was not brought me, my lord, there’s the cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
GLOUCESTER
You know the character to be your brother’s?
EDMUND
If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would think it were not.
GLOUCESTER
It is his.
EDMUND
It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents.
GLOUCESTER
Has he never before sounded you in this business?
EDMUND
Never, my lord. But I have heard him maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
GLOUCESTER
O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than brutish! Go, , seek him; I’ll apprehend him. Abominable villain, Where is he?
EDMUND
I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please you to suspend your indignation against my brother till you can derive from him better testimony of his intent, you should run a certain course; where, if you violently proceed against him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great gap in your own honour, and shake in pieces the heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life for him, that he writ this to feel my affection to your honour, and to no other pretence of danger.
GLOUCESTER
Think you so?
EDMUND
If your honour judge it meet, I will place you where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an auricular assurance have your satisfaction, and that without any further delay than this very evening.
GLOUCESTER
He cannot be such a monster.
EDMUND
Nor is not, sure.
GLOUCESTER
To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him. Heaven and earth! Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I pray you: frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution.
EDMUND
I will seek him, sir, ; convey the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you .
GLOUCESTER
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there’s son against father: the King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall lose nothing; do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offence, honesty! strange.
EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
EDMUND
Pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! Fa, sol, la, mi.
EDGAR
How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation are you in?
EDMUND
I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses.
EDGAR
Do you busy yourself with that?
EDMUND
I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily: as of unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and maledictions against King and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.
EDGAR
How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
EDMUND
Come, come! when saw you my father last?
EDGAR
The night gone by.
EDMUND
Spake you with him?
EDGAR
Ay, two hours together.
EDMUND
Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him, by word nor countenance?
EDGAR
None at all.
EDMUND
Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him: and at my entreaty forbear his presence until some little time qualified the heat of his displeasure; which at this instant so rageth in him that with the mischief of your person it would scarcely allay.
EDGAR
Some villain done me wrong.
EDMUND
That’s my fear. I pray you have a continent forbearance till the speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my lodging, from I will fitly bring you to hear my lord speak: pray , go; there’s my key. If you do stir abroad, go armed.
EDGAR
Armed, brother?
EDMUND
Brother, I advise you to the best; I am no honest man if there be any good meaning toward you: I have told you what I have seen and heard. But faintly; nothing like the image and horror of it: pray you, away!
EDGAR
Shall I hear from you ?
EDMUND
I do serve you in this business.
EDMUND
A credulous father! and a brother noble, Whose nature is so far from doing harms That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty My practices ride easy! I see the business. Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit; All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.